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Losing your Apple AirPods is pretty easy, thanks to their small, portable design. That’s why Apple created the Find My AirPods feature. It’s simple to set up and will help you find your missing AirPods in no time.

Editor’s note: this article was updated on September 29, 2022, to add information on using Find My AirPods with the Apple AirPods Pro (2nd generation).

Part of the larger Apple iCloud ecosystem, Find My is an app and a service that helps you find lost items. The service runs on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple Watch, AirPods, and AirTag. If you misplace something, the app offers various methods to help you locate it. If you think you lost your AirPods somewhere nearby, they can play a specific sound that travels across rooms well to help you find them, or help you locate them using precision tracking, in the case of the AirPods Pro (2nd generation). This mostly only works with Apple’s products, so if you lose a pair of third-party headphones, you’ll need to find them in some other way (with some exceptions).

On the other hand, if you aren’t sure where your AirPods are at all, whether that’s the gym, office, or somewhere else, the Find My service lets you use a map to see where they are. If the AirPods batteries run low, it will drop its last known location before dying completely. Other people’s nearby Apple devices can also send encrypted data about the location of your lost AirPods even when it isn’t online, too. Again, that only works for Apple’s products and not for your other headphones.

It’s relatively simple to add your AirPods to the Find My service. The specifics vary for each Apple device, but overall it’s straightforward.

Here’s how to enable Find My on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch:

Once your AirPods pairs successfully with your iPhone, Find My will automatically set up, too, so you should be good to go. However, to ensure you can find your lost AirPods even when it’s powered off or not synced to your iPhone, make sure to:

You can also use your Mac to take advantage of the Find My AirPods feature:

If you happen to lose your AirPods, don’t worry, just open the Find My app on your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or on a Mac that shares the same Apple ID and the latest macOS version. If you don’t have any of those, the Find Devices or Find Items apps on an Apple Watch will work, too.

If you have no ready access to any of those devices, the Find My app will also let you find your lost AirPods using a device someone else owns, as long as they are in your Family Sharing group. You can also sign in to iCloud’s find page using a web browser.

Once you are in the Find My app, you can mark your AirPods Pro as lost, play a sound to locate it, and view the location of your lost AirPods Pro. Plus, it can help you find it if it’s nearby, notify you when someone else with an Apple device finds it, or alert you when you’ve left your AirPods Pro behind. If you’ve lost your AirPods Pro (2nd generation) and have an iPhone with a U1 chip (iPhone 11 and later, excluding the SE), you can use precision tracking to find your AirPods. If the “Find” button says “nearby” underneath, you can press that to open a screen with an arrow showing the direction to go to find your AirPods, accompanied with haptic feedback and audio to aid you while you’re walking.

Standard AirPods (and some Beats headphones) only offer a more limited set of features. You can use Find My to view the true wireless earbuds’ location and play a sound to help you find them.

Losing your AirPods might happen more often than you’d like, thanks to the earbuds’ small size. With Find My and its handy features, there’s no need to worry about locating those misplaced earbuds.

Next: How to solve common AirPods problems

Your AirPods might sound too quiet because:

Pairing the AirPods to an iPhone is quick and simple:

The pairing process above also applies to pairing AirPods with an iPad.

No, none of the Apple AirPods support Bluetooth multipoint. However, you can take advantage of automatic device switching between Apple hardware under the same iCloud account. This means when you’re listening to music on your iPhone and start playing a video on your MacBook, the AirPods (3rd generation) will stop playing from your phone and immediately switch to the laptop’s audio output.